Connectivity between electrical and electromechanical components (e.g., circuit packages, fuse panels, and circuit boards) can be accomplished by way of a wiring harness. A wiring harness generally refers to a collection (e.g., bundle) of one or more wires coupled together. One example of a wiring harness is a bundle of separately insulated wires that couple an automobile dashboard with the control electronics for the automobile's engine. Another example is a bundle of wires that couple an airplane cockpit to the wing assembly, engines, tail assembly, and landing gear.
Wiring harness diagrams can reduce a potentially complicated collection of wires to a readable map of components and connections. Wiring harnesses can be represented using wiring harness diagrams, which can include many physical details of the wires, couplings, and components of a particular wiring harness. Software tools, such as the Capital® Harness Systems™ (CHS) product suite by Mentor Graphics Corporation, allow a user to design, analyze, engineer, and produce wiring harnesses for various types of electrical interconnect systems.
Wiring harness designs generally involve multiple ground devices (e.g., connections to ground) and fewer ground slots in which the ground devices can be placed. It is not uncommon for a single wiring harness design to have very few ground slots or even just a single ground slot. Software tools, such as Capital® Integrator™ by Mentor Graphics Corporation, can support the design and implementation of a grounding strategy using ground devices and a ground placement algorithm that can keep ground wiring at a desired length (e.g., as short as possible).
The use of such a ground placement algorithm typically results in many ground devices being placed in a few ground slots or even just a single ground slot which, by default, usually results in many separate ground trees (e.g., plural lines) running from each grounded device back to the ground slot or slots. While a user can use software functionality (e.g., the Combine Devices functionality with the Capital® Integrator™ tool) to manually combine the ground trees to create a smaller number of ground lines that can share wiring, there exists a need for the automatic combination of ground devices and/or ground lines using electronically stored ground design rules.